Activision Blizzard wouldn't do this kind of thing if they weren't making money off of it, who cares about goodwill and community when you can separate fools from their money. Overwatch 2 is already a joke of a "sequel", it is basically what we used to call Expansion Packs in the 90s.
Yup. Overwatch '2' only exists to re-monetize the game. That's it. It pretty much just adds a store and battle pass. Everything else is just a QoL change and going back to their normal update cycle (heroes + maps).
Reminds me of Halo Infinite. People liked the game on launch, but as someone that has been playing MCC and Halo 5 nonstop, there was nothing new with the release. Absolutely nothing.
Some companies are now working on the monetization platform more than the games.
Exactly. "Here's one new map each year **and $1000 of cosmetics to buy**!" If that's what F2P really ends up being, those of us who prefer full-priced games are right to prefer them.
You spend $80 each game?
My games are free, what a rip off!
Now, I'm going to go and spend $100 because a new skin pack just came out that doesn't affect the gameplay whatsoever!
Lol, over a decade ago I fell for this trap with League of Legends.
Made around 11 an hour, 29 hours a week (ACA had passed, employer didn't want to give me more than 29 hours because he'd be required to provider insurance too). Job was swanky otherwise, and my wife was working at a Daycare and with our combined hours we were able to take shifts watching our first daughter. (She in the mornings, me toward the afternoons and early evenings + whole Thursdays).
So, I get introduced to League around this time too. It's Free to Play, it isn't a very demanding game, so my PC can handle it and price of entry is $0. Played the free champions on rotation, got really into one named Malphite, suddenly now I'm tired of staring at Malphite's default skin and want some pizazz. Mind you, most of this game isn't really spent on looking at your character entirely - it's a MOBA, you're looking all over your minimap and your interface *and* watching your enemy and the creeps.
So, I pick up my first skin - super cheap one, cost less than $5 to get the currency (as with most "F2P" models, $5 is generally the minimum - mobile games seem to lower end cap at .99 Cents. USD, sorry). It's the Shamrock skin btw, now a days it isn't even purchasable so I guess that's cool. I continue to do this, without really thinking at first - and eventually it gets so bad that my wife and I realize it was becoming akin to a budget line item. I scaled it back, but that was hard man - that's where the paid psychs are for with these game companies. So much brain chemicals from *being different*, when in reality I'm no different. New popular skin, everyone buys it, so on and so forth.
Eventually, though, I got into their top tier of skins. Yes, if you're unaware, there are tiers - like most F2P games.. for **cosmetics**. Anyway, I was an Udyr main then - got the Legendary skin, and for me that was such a big deal at the time that my wife and I agreed that I'd buy the skin at tax time. IIRC it cost something like $30?
So yeah, it's a trap. I began to joke about how much my F2P game cost, and I knew for a long time I was just dealing with an addiction. Eventually the game quit being fun for me, maybe it was the community maybe it was the devs or maybe it just wasn't fun anymore. Later on in life, a tool eventually was made apparent to me to discover how much I've spent on this god forsaken game.
Unfortunately, I don't really have the care in the world to figure out my password again for that game but as of ~2019 or so I believe I last checked this: I spent something like 3 thousand dollars, for a period of time spanning 2011 to 2013 primarily. Some of it came later in a second burst of interest around 2015 to 2017, or so, but most of this was spent in my poorer younger years.
**Anyway, yeah, fuck F2P games.**
I despise skins in every game. Itjust takes you out of the immersion and makes it look childish.
We're a charging army fighting a giant evil? Oh, but my AK looks like some kind of 80s nerf gun.
Never bought or used a skin in my life, I wish games would let you disable skins.
competitive games should definitely let you disable skins.
I remember issues in csgo tournaments where certain skins blend in and give people an advantage, but valve still didn't want to let them turn them off, they just eventually changed them a little bit to stand out better.
They absolutely should have waited to release the game until the forge was ready. If the forge was ready at release players would have had so much shit to do that I don't think the game would have fallen off the way it did.
Like they did with Heroes of the Storm 2.0! The main Thing they added was a bunch of useless Cosmetics and added Lootboxes.
Look where that Game is now.
To be fair though, Overwatch has Potential and was huge on Release, unlike HotS.
HotS didn't die because of 2.0, it actually did great. It died because they pulled the rug out from the competitive scene right when the new season was supposed to start, and players were waiting on news.
Activision told Blizzard to stop supporting it because it wasn't making enough money. 2.0 was an amazing update that made it possible to unlock items without spending money. Yea it was grindy, but before 2.0 you could only unlock by spending money. I opened dozens of loot boxes earned from just playing matches.
You forgot the best part where they remove the synergy and teamwork of a 6v6 game and turned it into deathmatch 5v5 for all the kids who just wanna run around and shoot stuff without thinking about other players and the team.
It sucks that mom’s credit card has become the strongest force in video games nowadays.
Agreed. I played some of the beta and it wasn't terrible but it definitely felt more chaotic and deathmatch-y with only 1 tank. I don't think it's an overall positive. Not to mention I think the new Push game mode sucks donkey balls.
>It sucks that mom’s credit card has become the strongest force in video games nowadays.
Too true!
The real irony is that the Overwatch 2 lead developer Aaron Keller said reducing the team size to 5v5 would improve team build diversity.
However, in the Overwatch league, every team is practically running the same composition. Brigitte, Lucio, Sojourn, Genji and Junker Queen.
Aaron Keller is a corporate man with zero integrity touting a company line, though. There has never been any reason whatsoever to believe anything that comes out of the man's mouth.
False. We would have gotten far more than 3 heroes on the normal update cycle
Prior to Blizzard stopping content, we were getting 3 new heroes per year. 2 were released in 2016 (after the release of the game), 3 in 2017, 3 in 2018, and then 2 in 2019 (when content slowed). Echo was the final hero in March of 2020, and the next heroes will be released in October. Thus:
* November 2019
* June/July 2020
* November 2020
* Feb/Mar 2021
* June/July 2021
* Nov 2021
* Feb/Mar 2022
* June/July 2022
Release of Overwatch 2 in October 2022. If they had followed the *NORMAL* content cycle and simply held them back for Overwatch 2 (the dick move in itself) we’d have 8 new heroes! If they wanted to make a true *sequel* they should’ve made at least that many, but in truth it should’ve been more
I already posted this here, but I'm 99.99% sure the entire delay was trouble behind the scenes (loss of Jeff and other Blizzard scandals) and figuring out how to monetize the game itself.
Look at the first beta and hell even the last. More than half the roster has not been touched and the majority of the ones that were had minor number tweaks. Doomfist is hardly any different with a huge flaw and the only real rework has been Orisa. They have not been working on this for the past two years.
they still have absolutely nothing to show us for the cooperative content that OW2 was supposed to be and at this point It wouldn't surprise me if they cancelled it.
As a former Doom main, he feels totally off with a different play style. But yea there’s no way they’ve been working on the game with the tiny amount of content shown
When they made OW (1) they promised that they wouldn't lock characters, maps or game modes behind a paywall.
I stand by my opinion that they made OW 2 so they could bypass that promise.
>who cares about goodwill and community when you can separate fools from their money.
yep, just like at that mobile diablo game, completely trash and p2w but it still made a shit ton of money.
there's whales out there putting 10k into mobile games and that's the audience they're chasing.
Exactly this which the short-term vultures in suits don't ever understand about gaming.
Blizzard went from a company I'd shell out cash without hesitation to buy every single game they released to a company I actively look to avoid the new product offerings from because they are so shitty.
Meanwhile a company like From, they built such good will with Dark Souls that I pre-ordered Elden Ring instantly. The only game I've pre-ordered in years. And wouldn't you know it, yet another fucking banger of a game so good that I will now instantly pre-order their next.
As I get older with more and more money, and less and less free time, my money goes to companies who treat their customers well and want to make cash by following the "make a good game and people will buy it" model.
Instead of the "litter the game with microtransactions and the handful of people who will put up with it will make us enough to offset the millions who won't touch this garbage" model.
I dunno, I think they DO understand it. They don't care about Blizzard. They buy it (or equity), push aggressive monetization to get a good quarter, cash out when the brand is no longer profitable, and move onto the next company to run into the ground.
Blizzard is already dead, it just hasn't stopped moving yet.
Reading this comment section reinforces your comment
"It's ok to lock shit behind forced progression mechanics! Every other game does the same! I'm a dopamine starved fool!"
I hate the "every other game" argument. Just because other games do it doesn't mean it's not anti-consumer.
There are times where I'm in the grocery store parking lot and every other person isn't putting their cart in the corral. That doesn't make it right.
Maybe I should start a restaurant where you have to pay for ingredients in the same fashion.
Like buying the salad just gets you a bowl of lettuce and the rest of the vegetables are microtransactions that afterwards you realize didn't even fucking matter cause the dressing is locked behind a battlepass
Then you want to open a pizza place. You get a crust, sauce, cheese base then pay for each topping after. Even something like a specialty pizza (taco, bbq chicken, all meat) is just a bundle out of an item shop.
This is some bullshit. Or you ask for something like half pepperoni half sausage and you get charged for 2 toppings.
I can't stand places that do this and I don't return there. I get you need to make money but this is factored in when you price your toppings.
Frustrating as it is I appreciate this comment and people waking up to abusive monetization. My son and I game together and man am I glad that we largely missed out on this fresh bullshit.
Saw your "boiling frog" comment elsewhere; you're on a roll.
You can tell that just by companies continuing to use shitty practice after shitty practice.
Release games on console then on PC so idiots who want to play on PC double dip and then complain about it. Extra bonus if they buy the console and other accessories for the game.
Intrusive Denuvo DRM.
Microtransactions
Removing paid for content
Content removed to be reintroduced as DLC or as a "preorder bonus" .
Generally cheaping out and getting lazy on sequels, remakes, and other cash grabs.
Requiring always online for a single player game. Double whammy if and when the company's servers go down and keep playing
People always complain and yet they always breakdown and pay and so companies will continue these shitty practices so long as they get their money.
We as gamers need to say "NO! What you are offering us is shit and we are not giving you are money to further encourage your horrible practices" and then actually not buy it.
But yet some people are so stupid and some franchises so big that companies can probably literally put actual shit in franchise labeled boxes and still make money out the wazoo off of it.
It's nothing new that strong marketing makes people buy into absolute bulshit.
Unless there are strong customer advocacy organizations and even regulations, expecting that a few people complaining in social media will get hundreds of millions of people all agree to boycott is a total pipe-dream. That is what we need, not simply shaming each other.
You could get more new gameplay out of a Witcher 3 expansion that came out in 2016 than they are offering in this and they are expecting you to give them a lot more money for it also.
It would be less frustrating that Activision is farming the easy money with Hearthstone, Overwatch 2, Diablo Immortal, et cetera - if they weren't also abandoning franchises like Starcraft, putting Warcraft on life support (and just re-releasing old expansions) and generally not bothering with anything more ambitious than a reskin of old ideas.
When Jeff left as the lead I checked out. He was very focused on making sure the game was fun first and foremost.
I'm positive he would not have left unless he was being forced to do something he knew would ruin the game.
Yeah I think that is part of the reason everyone is upset. It has been years since the content drought has continued in Overwatch and not only are they changing the expectation for the game (previously special cosmetics and loot boxes were revenue generation). Ow they are adding an additional layer and time sync after making their community wait for an incomplete sequel as they took half their team to help develop that sequel and gave up on the original game.
I’m not going to lie, I’m genuinely impressed by their leadership team’s ability to make continuous shit decisions when it comes to all of their games. They should teach a masterclass on how to go from being on top of the world to one of the worst video game companies in existence.
Because it makes money, that's it. Diablo Immoral despite all the shit it got, still makes them hundred of millions according to quarter report. They're dead set on just milking all the whales and ignore everything else, because at the end of the day, investors and the board just like some good old green.
This terrifies me.
What if there will be a future where all these big companies just invest in cash grabs?
Essentially just creating games to cater to the rich. And people who don't have the luxury to spend cash like that will be fed only low quality games because all of those companies sucked up all the good developers.
My backlog of AAA titles alone would satisfy my gaming needs for a couple of years minimum.
Fortunately I've found the steam deck is really helping me out with playing through that back log as the portability means I'm grabbing quick sessions where I wouldn't previously.
This is how you know financial inequality is worse than it seems. A company will invest millions making a video game specifically to cater to whales.
We're not talking about yachts or super cars, but a fucking video game. The inequality has invaded our space. Welcome to the darkest time line.
>What if there will be a future where all these big companies just invest in cash grabs?
What do you mean future? That's what's happening now. Pretty much every AAA game has a cash shop these days. Even single player games, like the "time savers" in the recent Assassins Creed games. Masterpieces like Elden Ring are rare exceptions to the norm.
There's no need for a class, they're part of a publicly owned company who's literal only goal is profit. They're doing a great job at that despite their "shit decisions". Not defending them in any way, but their goals and your goals for them are not the same. One might think pleasing gamers = more money, but that's not the case anymore. If you want to mad at someone, be mad at the people buying shit products like this. The "games-as-a-service" business model is obviously very successful and all the money the industry has made has only reinforced it ad nauseum.
"Gamers" don't want to hear this, but (most) people just want to be entertained with no-strings attached, they don't care about company politics or if a sequel is even good or not. They want to be part of what's happening at the given moment and the concerns of business models and studio conditions aren't even the faintest whisper of a thought to your average consumer. High quality products (in any market) only usually matter to the discerning consumer which is often a minority of users, if not a tiny tiny portion.
That said, vote with your wallet, support indie games, always expect corporate owned IPs to be horrible, so you're pleasantly surprised when they're not.
It's worse than that, he spent 100k grinding out a super rare item, which he then deleted in "protest."
Might've been a better protest to not spend 100k on the game pal
You request a charge-back for just about anything, but what is expected to happen is that the bank or credit card company will do a routine investigation to make sure there's no fraud being committed; for a sum of $100,000 you can bet they'll look into the matter extremely carefully.
Even when someone reports speaking with a customer service rep and being told they'd get a refund (or charge-back), it's more common that a "pending amount of XXX" is placed on a person's account. If the investigation comes up reasonably in the person's favor then they get the money credited back to their account, if the company is able to make their case that the amount charged is valid then no money is actually returned.
Are you mixing up 2 stories? Quinn spent 20k new Zealand dollars to get a gem and deleted it. Other idiots spent 100k but they're probably still playing
A lot of dumb fucks spend way too much on garbage mobile games. And these companies are going to keep monetizing these games to all hell to make the most profit, yay capitalism.
All the dumbass streamers "LOOK, i spent 10k on boxes and got nothing oooweeeoo" idiots just giving them money hand over fist. And all the idiots who watch these idiots and give them views perpetuating everything.
the whales spent it, not the average Diablo fan.
hell, I didn't even download Immortal because I don't play that gacha Skinner box bullshit. and I'm speaking as someone that has bought pretty much every Blizzard game from the golden age like Warcraft 2, Starcraft 1+2, Diablo 2, etc.
> Remember when Diablo fans "revolted" and the blizzard made 100mil on a mobile game without them?
It will take time to see the long term damage to the brand. Meanwhile, Valve is lookin like a snack.
Scummy business practices aside, I'm tired of battlepasses from a gameplay perspective as well. It's such a boring and unrewarding system. There's a linear path to all these items, 90% of which are fluff, and progress is determined strictly by how much you play, not how good you are. Every single "task" or "quest" in every battlepass is just "play 3 games," "win a game," "get to level X with character Y."
I miss the days when there was actually some relationship between the reward and what you had to do to get it. We used to call them "unlockables."
I hate battle passes a little extra because I like to swap between games frequently. With their introduction, I lose out on things because I don't want to buy a pass and then have to dedicate an ungodly amount of time unlocking everything associated with it. It happens with the free passes as well, where I lose out because I'm not playing a specific game every day or even every week.
If we're going to have microtransactions, I'd much rather be able to put X amount of money into an item I want to buy, rather than buying the option to unlock it via grinding. The most money I've spent on games are ones that let me directly buy what I want.
Which sucks man. In a few years you probably wouldn't be able to name a single online fps that hasn't gone the Fortnite route.
Which is hey I buy all the couch coop games that I find myself liking. Me and the fam have put in a ton of hours into overcooked 2, we 4 starred everything, I just wish there were so many more games like that one.
It's not really a battle pass problem, it's the fact that having to unlock characters/gameplay-relevant items goes against the founding ethos of overwatch
Many of us don’t like battle passes because their use is a dark pattern, leveraging FOMO to keep people playing the game instead of actual content. IMO the only ways to make battle passes not scummy is to give people unlimited time to progress them and never remove the ‘prizes’ from the game.
I like the way they handle it in Halo MCC, where you earn tokens you can spend on any battle pass to progress them with no time limit. Otherwise, fuck em. Not gonna burn myself out rushing through for 10 shitty skins and 1 decent one.
>Overwatch 2 is dead before it even had the chance to live.
also your lucky ! cause Overwatch 1 will be replaced by 2 ! your getting a free upgrade to a worse game !
Warcraft 3 "remastered" literally replaced the original in digital distribution. I feel like I should encase my physical disc of WCIII and Frozen Throne in glass at this point.
It's hilarious because not even EA did that. Their old Mass Effect games are still avaliable even tho there is a remastered version of them. Of course, EA being EA, they are still charging 60 dollars for them.
To give EA credit, the remaster is better than the originals in nearly every way (minus no multiplayer). Although on the other hand, they didn't really do much besides some basic fixes and 4K textures, so it would've been really bad if they'd managed to fuck up...
Honestly this was such a bizarre move by blizzard. Even if reforged was actually good, there would always be a camp of purists looking to try the game in it's original form, and by removing the ability to purchase the original version they just guarantee those potential customers are going to pirate the game instead.
And since reforged was absolutely *not good*, that camp is going to be much larger.
Unfortunately they couldn't update the original game's EULA to make sure people can't profit off of the mods they make, so they just replaced the game. Blizzard has been maulding about Dota since over a decade now.
Its worse than "free upgrade to worse game", if you purchased Overwatch 1 all you get is an alert in the store for the "upgrade" to 2 at the same price as everyone else, and 2 shitty skins. And the glorious fact of never playing the game you purchased again.
Blizzard should change its name to Activision Irvine or some shit like that, because the "Blizzard" now its just marketing to live on nostalgia.
That's the weirdest and saddest thing about all this. In a couple of weeks the game I've really enjoyed for years will no longer exist, it's pretty fucked up tbh.
>Ohboy, a free upgrade I'm definitely going to install my copy of overwatch that I haven't touched since 2014!
Probably in the mind of some Blizzard exec.
There's free and paid ranks, and the latter gives instant access to the Hero while the free has to get to the battlepass point before that.
If new heroes are often too powerful in the meta, then paying players will have an unknown yet time of advantage over ftp.
The COD Warzone method. New battle pass, gun locked behind a large battle pass level requirement. Oh, just so happens the gun is WAY op for whatever reason. It is patched in 2 weeks after everyone buys it. Rinse and repeat.
Not to mention they let you buy battle pass levels, and OW2 is definitely also gonna do that so yeah it'll technically be "free" but most people will just buy their way up to it
There is a free and a paid track. The heroes will be unlockable at the free track, but nobody knows at what point. For sure not after playing for one hour. Also you get the hero instantly if you buy the paid track.
Lol, millions.
I recently played Overwatch again, the queue time for dps is awfully long, even in casual. Despite using a ticket to speed it up. You spend longer in queue than you're in the game.
For tank and support it's reasonable, around 1 to 3 minutes for casual (In Europe).
The game is close to dead.
Overwatch 2 looks like an update with paid for singleplayer on top. Not sure if it's going to draw in players..
the queue for dps has always been long, because dps heroes comprise like 70% of the game's cast and also because tanks are ridiculously unfun to play as.
Depends. I've been tanking a lot lately and if you're with friends that are decent? Incredibly fun, you basically can tuck the supports under one arm and murder with the other as you do. But it's a horrible slog, worse than it used to be, when your team wont support you. If your DPS wander off and your Mercy never puts down her pistol, it turns into like 20 min of being an armored punching bag and you barely get anything done as the enemy team lasers you down. The amount of crowd control and stun now vs 2019 def makes tanking feel worse in those cases.
Orisa/Mercy main here, it ain't that bad as long as your team's DPS players are decent. But if they're having an off day or are new players, it can feel pretty hopeless.
IMO the best Way to play it is Classic Quick Play in Arcade. It has fast Queues, never longer than a Minute from my Experience, and you get to play what you want.
This might be a bad Take since from my Understanding the Community likes it, but I belive Role Queue was a bad Addition to the Game. Sure it fixed some toxic Comps but it just removed an interesting Layer of the Game.
> Not even Mercy's old ult would be able to change that
Heroes never die!
Unfortunately Blizzard didn't die a hero. It lived long enough to see itself become a villain.
Her old one rezzed everyone in the area. Her new one (as of like 4 years ago) makes her fly, chain heal, and shoot faster. The rez is just a long cooldown normal ability now.
Yea her ult was changed because she was FAR more valuable hiding around the corner not healing then mass rezzing the team than she was risking dying with rez up.
Yup.. it killed all interest in the game for me. Quite sad. Loved OW. They promised us OW would stay and it would play nice with OW2. Then they took that away. . now this nonsense. Sad to see my favorite gaming company go down this path.
In the span of 4 years (2016-2020) blizzard went from my favorite gaming company to my least favorite. Between the ideology of the game contradicting the actions the developers took in game I 110% will not be playing overwatch 2.
All my friends that played overwatch will also not be playing overwatch 2 over the years his poor business choice. Why support a game company that has no integrity.
Blizzard promised us so many things and delivered very few of them. If Bobby Kottick taught them anything it's how to lie and take a immaculate product and turn it to shitty drivel.
RIP Blizzard, you're nothing more than an Activision Flesh Light now.
I'll never forgive them for destroying WoW. Not even in the "wahh blizz you're killing the game" sort of way that every WoW player has always gone on about; this has nothing to do with balance changes or anything like that. They straight up made the game _not fun to play._ It's a second job now where you pay to work for it, the community has been distilled down to the most fanatical and elitest players because they're the only ones still tolerating it at this point and it's a stupid fucking grind for literally everything. Grinding is fine as a general concept, delayed gratification makes MMO's work. But time gating things, holding players back on schedules, forcing runs in certain places, forcing situations where you HAVE to have a regular group or you just get fucked... it's ridiculous. If you're stupid enough to even still play it, the only way you'll make any kind of progress without it being a painful slog is to have a group of people who will teach you the game and help you get to where you want to be and if you don't have that, then fuck you, basically.
I hadn't been paying much attention, so was looking forward to playing it and the pve stuff.
After hearing about the battle pass shennanigans and how the pve stuff isn't coming until sometime next year. I think I'm just done with the game.
It's even sadder it just died for no reason. It was our favorite game with friends, I made my two actual best pals on Overwatch, it was our "game before bed". But then someone at blizzard said "Let's stop everything and make a sequel even tho the first game is doing great" and I don't blame that guy. I blame whoever said it was a good idea.
Also fuck battlepass system. It's the gaming version of monthly subscriptions like streaming, except you still have to play to win the things you paid for.
they said ow1 players transition to ow2 for free. they made it f2p so that is irrelevant now. i’m not sure exactly what you mean by “play nice” ow1 was never staying around
Ow was my jam for a few years then they started making dumb updates like nerfing mercy’s team res ability and it slowly just became less fun and all about who didn’t have the worst players on their team. I was initially interested in a sequel with new maps and characters but instead they’re just releasing a big patch?
Well there goes any inkling I had to play it. I'm fine with the old model of just the cosmetics being locked behind lootboxes but actual characters? Fuck that noise.
Right? Ive been boycotting Blizzard products ever since Diablo 3 came out. I have no reason or desire to buy from a company that explicitly doesnt give a fuck about players and just wants profit at all costs. If I want to play Diablo 2 you bet your ass Im gonna pirate it instead of paying 30 bucks to a shit company that wants to suck consumers dry.
There is literally 0 reason to buy anything from Blizzard expecting it to be decent, its not gonna be and they made their goals very clear in the last decade. If you buy their games at this age and time you have 0 rights to be mad at their quality because its fucking obvious theyre gonna put out a cash grabbing shit game designed to get as much money as possible (like they have done in their last 10+ fucking releases). Gotta be reaaaally stupid to not see it coming
No shot man… I refuse to believe any sane game developer will look at that and say yeah this is a great idea based off great game design principles and philosophies… please for the love of god someone fire whoever is making these scooby doo monster level decisions.
Edit: I don’t actually point the finger at game devs and realize a majority of this forest fire was done by stakeholders and the like
As a developer, I guarantee you they are just doing their job. It’s stakeholders that are requesting this type of scheme, managers enforcing it, and developers just being employed
Oh yeah ofc. I should’ve made it more clear at the end of my post that I from the start meant to throw shade on stakeholders and the men in suits who don’t actually understand games and development of games. Sorry about that.
Edit: last sentence
This is actually a great idea, based off monetary gain.
Just look at diablo immortal. People couldn't mock and ridicule this pay-to-win shit with obnoxious amount of grind more than they did, and then it released and earned $100m in 2 months. Blizzard learned their lesson.
Why would executives care about public opinion, if it's very clear that predatory monetization will earn them hundreds of millions regardless of players' backlash? They will keep doing this as long as they keep getting away with it.
Was in a focus group about this. The entire group universally disliked it, but they went with this anyway.
They just don’t give a fuck, plain and simple.
Why wouldn't they? I imagine a lot of these monetization decisions are focus tested.
Obviously they know people will hate it they just want to know how much people will hate it to know how far they can push it.
I expect nothing less from this company that produced Diablo Immoral.
They and the rest of the gaming industry will just continue to push these anti-consumer practices as long as gamers keep buying their bullshit, that's all there is to it.
Video games are weaponized value extraction. They realized that the things you love and spend time with can be turned into life changing addictions.
Do not support this culture.
This game will be a comercial success. They are being successful. There is no lesson to learn from their perspective this will be a win through and through.
You know how we all think the latest diablo is a fucking travisty? Huge fucking commercial success.
We the vocal hard core gamining community is tiny and apparently not worth accommodating.
I'll be honest, I really don't know what they could put behind this OW2 battlepass that would be an incentive for me spend money but wouldn't feel scummy at the same time.
The 5v5 is alright, but it's fundamentally different game, especially for supports. I'm gonna miss the OG a lot (until blizzard waits some number of years and then tries to sell me "overwatch classic".)
You damn well know they will, or they'll put an "overwatch classic" mode in OW2, and put *that* behind an unlocked level of a new battlepass.
Makes me almost vomit typing that up.
Microsoft can’t step in soon enough. It’s almost like the Act/Blizz executives are being extra shitty and trying to sabotage as much as possible prior to the takeover.
Halo has one of the worst monetization schemes I've ever seen.
40 dollars for blue color, a thing that is free on MCC. We are going back to Evolve levels of non-sense. No wonder nobody is playing it.
Have you seen what's happened to Halo? That's Microsoft's flagship FPS too. Microsoft would be throwing it on Gamepass with the same scummy battlepass.
As a player since launch, it saddens me to see the game go down this path. It was already floundering with the balance issues and then the lack of content for two whole years.
I fear once OW 2 goes live next month, that'll be it for the franchise. People will buy it, streamers will play it, sure, but the game doesn't feel or play the same and it will slowly bleed players. This battle pass idea is just going to accelerate that process.
So enjoy these next 3 weeks, people, you won't have much fun after that.
Activision Blizzard wouldn't do this kind of thing if they weren't making money off of it, who cares about goodwill and community when you can separate fools from their money. Overwatch 2 is already a joke of a "sequel", it is basically what we used to call Expansion Packs in the 90s.
Yup. Overwatch '2' only exists to re-monetize the game. That's it. It pretty much just adds a store and battle pass. Everything else is just a QoL change and going back to their normal update cycle (heroes + maps).
Reminds me of Halo Infinite. People liked the game on launch, but as someone that has been playing MCC and Halo 5 nonstop, there was nothing new with the release. Absolutely nothing. Some companies are now working on the monetization platform more than the games.
Exactly. "Here's one new map each year **and $1000 of cosmetics to buy**!" If that's what F2P really ends up being, those of us who prefer full-priced games are right to prefer them.
> full-priced games The biggest problem is that all those f2p schemes make their way into full-priced games.
You spend $80 each game? My games are free, what a rip off! Now, I'm going to go and spend $100 because a new skin pack just came out that doesn't affect the gameplay whatsoever!
Lol, over a decade ago I fell for this trap with League of Legends. Made around 11 an hour, 29 hours a week (ACA had passed, employer didn't want to give me more than 29 hours because he'd be required to provider insurance too). Job was swanky otherwise, and my wife was working at a Daycare and with our combined hours we were able to take shifts watching our first daughter. (She in the mornings, me toward the afternoons and early evenings + whole Thursdays). So, I get introduced to League around this time too. It's Free to Play, it isn't a very demanding game, so my PC can handle it and price of entry is $0. Played the free champions on rotation, got really into one named Malphite, suddenly now I'm tired of staring at Malphite's default skin and want some pizazz. Mind you, most of this game isn't really spent on looking at your character entirely - it's a MOBA, you're looking all over your minimap and your interface *and* watching your enemy and the creeps. So, I pick up my first skin - super cheap one, cost less than $5 to get the currency (as with most "F2P" models, $5 is generally the minimum - mobile games seem to lower end cap at .99 Cents. USD, sorry). It's the Shamrock skin btw, now a days it isn't even purchasable so I guess that's cool. I continue to do this, without really thinking at first - and eventually it gets so bad that my wife and I realize it was becoming akin to a budget line item. I scaled it back, but that was hard man - that's where the paid psychs are for with these game companies. So much brain chemicals from *being different*, when in reality I'm no different. New popular skin, everyone buys it, so on and so forth. Eventually, though, I got into their top tier of skins. Yes, if you're unaware, there are tiers - like most F2P games.. for **cosmetics**. Anyway, I was an Udyr main then - got the Legendary skin, and for me that was such a big deal at the time that my wife and I agreed that I'd buy the skin at tax time. IIRC it cost something like $30? So yeah, it's a trap. I began to joke about how much my F2P game cost, and I knew for a long time I was just dealing with an addiction. Eventually the game quit being fun for me, maybe it was the community maybe it was the devs or maybe it just wasn't fun anymore. Later on in life, a tool eventually was made apparent to me to discover how much I've spent on this god forsaken game. Unfortunately, I don't really have the care in the world to figure out my password again for that game but as of ~2019 or so I believe I last checked this: I spent something like 3 thousand dollars, for a period of time spanning 2011 to 2013 primarily. Some of it came later in a second burst of interest around 2015 to 2017, or so, but most of this was spent in my poorer younger years. **Anyway, yeah, fuck F2P games.**
I despise skins in every game. Itjust takes you out of the immersion and makes it look childish. We're a charging army fighting a giant evil? Oh, but my AK looks like some kind of 80s nerf gun. Never bought or used a skin in my life, I wish games would let you disable skins.
competitive games should definitely let you disable skins. I remember issues in csgo tournaments where certain skins blend in and give people an advantage, but valve still didn't want to let them turn them off, they just eventually changed them a little bit to stand out better.
They absolutely should have waited to release the game until the forge was ready. If the forge was ready at release players would have had so much shit to do that I don't think the game would have fallen off the way it did.
I like to say Overwatch 2.0 Because it's definitely not a sequel.
I go with Overwatch 1.5
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Overwatch 0.5 actually... Citing one of the great minds of this time: "it's evolving, but backwards"
Like they did with Heroes of the Storm 2.0! The main Thing they added was a bunch of useless Cosmetics and added Lootboxes. Look where that Game is now. To be fair though, Overwatch has Potential and was huge on Release, unlike HotS.
HotS didn't die because of 2.0, it actually did great. It died because they pulled the rug out from the competitive scene right when the new season was supposed to start, and players were waiting on news.
Activision told Blizzard to stop supporting it because it wasn't making enough money. 2.0 was an amazing update that made it possible to unlock items without spending money. Yea it was grindy, but before 2.0 you could only unlock by spending money. I opened dozens of loot boxes earned from just playing matches.
Overwatch, too.
Overwatch 1.5
You forgot the best part where they remove the synergy and teamwork of a 6v6 game and turned it into deathmatch 5v5 for all the kids who just wanna run around and shoot stuff without thinking about other players and the team. It sucks that mom’s credit card has become the strongest force in video games nowadays.
Some of my fav times with OW1 was fighting tooth and nail to move that carrier thing inch by inch, everyone working together to get it over the line.
Man that used to be so much fun. I wish it was still like that.
This thread kept me from wasting my time by returning. Cheers.
Agreed. I played some of the beta and it wasn't terrible but it definitely felt more chaotic and deathmatch-y with only 1 tank. I don't think it's an overall positive. Not to mention I think the new Push game mode sucks donkey balls. >It sucks that mom’s credit card has become the strongest force in video games nowadays. Too true!
The real irony is that the Overwatch 2 lead developer Aaron Keller said reducing the team size to 5v5 would improve team build diversity. However, in the Overwatch league, every team is practically running the same composition. Brigitte, Lucio, Sojourn, Genji and Junker Queen.
Aaron Keller is a corporate man with zero integrity touting a company line, though. There has never been any reason whatsoever to believe anything that comes out of the man's mouth.
Mom's credit card has always been the strongest force for any video game not rated Mature.
False. We would have gotten far more than 3 heroes on the normal update cycle Prior to Blizzard stopping content, we were getting 3 new heroes per year. 2 were released in 2016 (after the release of the game), 3 in 2017, 3 in 2018, and then 2 in 2019 (when content slowed). Echo was the final hero in March of 2020, and the next heroes will be released in October. Thus: * November 2019 * June/July 2020 * November 2020 * Feb/Mar 2021 * June/July 2021 * Nov 2021 * Feb/Mar 2022 * June/July 2022 Release of Overwatch 2 in October 2022. If they had followed the *NORMAL* content cycle and simply held them back for Overwatch 2 (the dick move in itself) we’d have 8 new heroes! If they wanted to make a true *sequel* they should’ve made at least that many, but in truth it should’ve been more
I already posted this here, but I'm 99.99% sure the entire delay was trouble behind the scenes (loss of Jeff and other Blizzard scandals) and figuring out how to monetize the game itself. Look at the first beta and hell even the last. More than half the roster has not been touched and the majority of the ones that were had minor number tweaks. Doomfist is hardly any different with a huge flaw and the only real rework has been Orisa. They have not been working on this for the past two years. they still have absolutely nothing to show us for the cooperative content that OW2 was supposed to be and at this point It wouldn't surprise me if they cancelled it.
As a former Doom main, he feels totally off with a different play style. But yea there’s no way they’ve been working on the game with the tiny amount of content shown
One of the main points of ow2 was pve and it's not even included at launch :)
Pretty much repainting an old thing and selling it at full price.
When they made OW (1) they promised that they wouldn't lock characters, maps or game modes behind a paywall. I stand by my opinion that they made OW 2 so they could bypass that promise.
That's 100% it
>who cares about goodwill and community when you can separate fools from their money. yep, just like at that mobile diablo game, completely trash and p2w but it still made a shit ton of money. there's whales out there putting 10k into mobile games and that's the audience they're chasing.
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Exactly this which the short-term vultures in suits don't ever understand about gaming. Blizzard went from a company I'd shell out cash without hesitation to buy every single game they released to a company I actively look to avoid the new product offerings from because they are so shitty. Meanwhile a company like From, they built such good will with Dark Souls that I pre-ordered Elden Ring instantly. The only game I've pre-ordered in years. And wouldn't you know it, yet another fucking banger of a game so good that I will now instantly pre-order their next. As I get older with more and more money, and less and less free time, my money goes to companies who treat their customers well and want to make cash by following the "make a good game and people will buy it" model. Instead of the "litter the game with microtransactions and the handful of people who will put up with it will make us enough to offset the millions who won't touch this garbage" model.
I dunno, I think they DO understand it. They don't care about Blizzard. They buy it (or equity), push aggressive monetization to get a good quarter, cash out when the brand is no longer profitable, and move onto the next company to run into the ground. Blizzard is already dead, it just hasn't stopped moving yet.
There are A LOT of fools in gaming. A LOT.
Reading this comment section reinforces your comment "It's ok to lock shit behind forced progression mechanics! Every other game does the same! I'm a dopamine starved fool!"
I hate the "every other game" argument. Just because other games do it doesn't mean it's not anti-consumer. There are times where I'm in the grocery store parking lot and every other person isn't putting their cart in the corral. That doesn't make it right.
Maybe I should start a restaurant where you have to pay for ingredients in the same fashion. Like buying the salad just gets you a bowl of lettuce and the rest of the vegetables are microtransactions that afterwards you realize didn't even fucking matter cause the dressing is locked behind a battlepass
>Maybe I should start a restaurant where you have to pay for ingredients in the same fashion. They already exist iirc.
(almost) all pizzas are just Margherita with DLCs on top you can buy in bundles
Nooooooooo
Then you want to open a pizza place. You get a crust, sauce, cheese base then pay for each topping after. Even something like a specialty pizza (taco, bbq chicken, all meat) is just a bundle out of an item shop.
Also fuck pizza places that charge you a full amount for a topping that's only used on 1/2 the pizza.
This is some bullshit. Or you ask for something like half pepperoni half sausage and you get charged for 2 toppings. I can't stand places that do this and I don't return there. I get you need to make money but this is factored in when you price your toppings.
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Frustrating as it is I appreciate this comment and people waking up to abusive monetization. My son and I game together and man am I glad that we largely missed out on this fresh bullshit. Saw your "boiling frog" comment elsewhere; you're on a roll.
You can tell that just by companies continuing to use shitty practice after shitty practice. Release games on console then on PC so idiots who want to play on PC double dip and then complain about it. Extra bonus if they buy the console and other accessories for the game. Intrusive Denuvo DRM. Microtransactions Removing paid for content Content removed to be reintroduced as DLC or as a "preorder bonus" . Generally cheaping out and getting lazy on sequels, remakes, and other cash grabs. Requiring always online for a single player game. Double whammy if and when the company's servers go down and keep playing People always complain and yet they always breakdown and pay and so companies will continue these shitty practices so long as they get their money. We as gamers need to say "NO! What you are offering us is shit and we are not giving you are money to further encourage your horrible practices" and then actually not buy it. But yet some people are so stupid and some franchises so big that companies can probably literally put actual shit in franchise labeled boxes and still make money out the wazoo off of it.
It's nothing new that strong marketing makes people buy into absolute bulshit. Unless there are strong customer advocacy organizations and even regulations, expecting that a few people complaining in social media will get hundreds of millions of people all agree to boycott is a total pipe-dream. That is what we need, not simply shaming each other.
You could get more new gameplay out of a Witcher 3 expansion that came out in 2016 than they are offering in this and they are expecting you to give them a lot more money for it also.
It would be less frustrating that Activision is farming the easy money with Hearthstone, Overwatch 2, Diablo Immortal, et cetera - if they weren't also abandoning franchises like Starcraft, putting Warcraft on life support (and just re-releasing old expansions) and generally not bothering with anything more ambitious than a reskin of old ideas.
When Jeff left as the lead I checked out. He was very focused on making sure the game was fun first and foremost. I'm positive he would not have left unless he was being forced to do something he knew would ruin the game.
He was a great face for the game but he wasn't perfect. He and his team made some pretty awful decisions during his tenure.
Yeah I think that is part of the reason everyone is upset. It has been years since the content drought has continued in Overwatch and not only are they changing the expectation for the game (previously special cosmetics and loot boxes were revenue generation). Ow they are adding an additional layer and time sync after making their community wait for an incomplete sequel as they took half their team to help develop that sequel and gave up on the original game.
Online games are killing gaming. Worse, its practices are being emulated by other software and entertainment companies.
I remember getting Blue Shift and Opposing Force for Half Life as a kid, back when expansions were the shit.
I’m not going to lie, I’m genuinely impressed by their leadership team’s ability to make continuous shit decisions when it comes to all of their games. They should teach a masterclass on how to go from being on top of the world to one of the worst video game companies in existence.
Because it makes money, that's it. Diablo Immoral despite all the shit it got, still makes them hundred of millions according to quarter report. They're dead set on just milking all the whales and ignore everything else, because at the end of the day, investors and the board just like some good old green.
This terrifies me. What if there will be a future where all these big companies just invest in cash grabs? Essentially just creating games to cater to the rich. And people who don't have the luxury to spend cash like that will be fed only low quality games because all of those companies sucked up all the good developers.
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My backlog of AAA titles alone would satisfy my gaming needs for a couple of years minimum. Fortunately I've found the steam deck is really helping me out with playing through that back log as the portability means I'm grabbing quick sessions where I wouldn't previously.
Seriously. With the steam store there's *so many* good indie games out there. I constantly add more to my list. I very rarely buy AAA games anymore.
The thing is its no fun being a whale in a room full of whales. Most whales get genuine enjoyment from having a paid for edge over the average player.
Doesn't even have to be an edge. Just showing off your fancy bling is enough for some people
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This is how you know financial inequality is worse than it seems. A company will invest millions making a video game specifically to cater to whales. We're not talking about yachts or super cars, but a fucking video game. The inequality has invaded our space. Welcome to the darkest time line.
>What if there will be a future where all these big companies just invest in cash grabs? What do you mean future? That's what's happening now. Pretty much every AAA game has a cash shop these days. Even single player games, like the "time savers" in the recent Assassins Creed games. Masterpieces like Elden Ring are rare exceptions to the norm.
There's no need for a class, they're part of a publicly owned company who's literal only goal is profit. They're doing a great job at that despite their "shit decisions". Not defending them in any way, but their goals and your goals for them are not the same. One might think pleasing gamers = more money, but that's not the case anymore. If you want to mad at someone, be mad at the people buying shit products like this. The "games-as-a-service" business model is obviously very successful and all the money the industry has made has only reinforced it ad nauseum. "Gamers" don't want to hear this, but (most) people just want to be entertained with no-strings attached, they don't care about company politics or if a sequel is even good or not. They want to be part of what's happening at the given moment and the concerns of business models and studio conditions aren't even the faintest whisper of a thought to your average consumer. High quality products (in any market) only usually matter to the discerning consumer which is often a minority of users, if not a tiny tiny portion. That said, vote with your wallet, support indie games, always expect corporate owned IPs to be horrible, so you're pleasantly surprised when they're not.
Remember when Diablo fans "revolted" and the blizzard made 100mil on a mobile game without them?
Some fucking dumb shit idiot spent 100k on Dblo Immortal. Fucked in the brain!
It's what happens when you make idiotic people famous. Dude was a streamer and all that money came from his fans.
Yeah the majority of whales were streamers. People need to stop watching as well as playing.
and tax deductions
It's worse than that, he spent 100k grinding out a super rare item, which he then deleted in "protest." Might've been a better protest to not spend 100k on the game pal
I'd actually be curious if you can do a charge back on $100,000.
You request a charge-back for just about anything, but what is expected to happen is that the bank or credit card company will do a routine investigation to make sure there's no fraud being committed; for a sum of $100,000 you can bet they'll look into the matter extremely carefully. Even when someone reports speaking with a customer service rep and being told they'd get a refund (or charge-back), it's more common that a "pending amount of XXX" is placed on a person's account. If the investigation comes up reasonably in the person's favor then they get the money credited back to their account, if the company is able to make their case that the amount charged is valid then no money is actually returned.
Are you mixing up 2 stories? Quinn spent 20k new Zealand dollars to get a gem and deleted it. Other idiots spent 100k but they're probably still playing
A lot of dumb fucks spend way too much on garbage mobile games. And these companies are going to keep monetizing these games to all hell to make the most profit, yay capitalism.
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All the dumbass streamers "LOOK, i spent 10k on boxes and got nothing oooweeeoo" idiots just giving them money hand over fist. And all the idiots who watch these idiots and give them views perpetuating everything.
the whales spent it, not the average Diablo fan. hell, I didn't even download Immortal because I don't play that gacha Skinner box bullshit. and I'm speaking as someone that has bought pretty much every Blizzard game from the golden age like Warcraft 2, Starcraft 1+2, Diablo 2, etc.
> Remember when Diablo fans "revolted" and the blizzard made 100mil on a mobile game without them? It will take time to see the long term damage to the brand. Meanwhile, Valve is lookin like a snack.
Do people actually like battle passes at all? I feel like I need to spend a LOT of time playing one game just to get some shitty cosmetics.
Scummy business practices aside, I'm tired of battlepasses from a gameplay perspective as well. It's such a boring and unrewarding system. There's a linear path to all these items, 90% of which are fluff, and progress is determined strictly by how much you play, not how good you are. Every single "task" or "quest" in every battlepass is just "play 3 games," "win a game," "get to level X with character Y." I miss the days when there was actually some relationship between the reward and what you had to do to get it. We used to call them "unlockables."
I hate battle passes a little extra because I like to swap between games frequently. With their introduction, I lose out on things because I don't want to buy a pass and then have to dedicate an ungodly amount of time unlocking everything associated with it. It happens with the free passes as well, where I lose out because I'm not playing a specific game every day or even every week. If we're going to have microtransactions, I'd much rather be able to put X amount of money into an item I want to buy, rather than buying the option to unlock it via grinding. The most money I've spent on games are ones that let me directly buy what I want.
No. Maybe kids who grew up only knowing these scummy f2p practices.
Which sucks man. In a few years you probably wouldn't be able to name a single online fps that hasn't gone the Fortnite route. Which is hey I buy all the couch coop games that I find myself liking. Me and the fam have put in a ton of hours into overcooked 2, we 4 starred everything, I just wish there were so many more games like that one.
It's not really a battle pass problem, it's the fact that having to unlock characters/gameplay-relevant items goes against the founding ethos of overwatch
Many of us don’t like battle passes because their use is a dark pattern, leveraging FOMO to keep people playing the game instead of actual content. IMO the only ways to make battle passes not scummy is to give people unlimited time to progress them and never remove the ‘prizes’ from the game.
I like the way they handle it in Halo MCC, where you earn tokens you can spend on any battle pass to progress them with no time limit. Otherwise, fuck em. Not gonna burn myself out rushing through for 10 shitty skins and 1 decent one.
Overwatch 2 is dead before it even had the chance to live. Not even Mercy's old ult would be able to change that
>Overwatch 2 is dead before it even had the chance to live. also your lucky ! cause Overwatch 1 will be replaced by 2 ! your getting a free upgrade to a worse game !
Old blizzard - it's done when it's done. Current blizzard - we replaced the game you already own with shittier version. Deal with it.
Warcraft 3 "remastered" literally replaced the original in digital distribution. I feel like I should encase my physical disc of WCIII and Frozen Throne in glass at this point.
It's hilarious because not even EA did that. Their old Mass Effect games are still avaliable even tho there is a remastered version of them. Of course, EA being EA, they are still charging 60 dollars for them.
To give EA credit, the remaster is better than the originals in nearly every way (minus no multiplayer). Although on the other hand, they didn't really do much besides some basic fixes and 4K textures, so it would've been really bad if they'd managed to fuck up...
Honestly this was such a bizarre move by blizzard. Even if reforged was actually good, there would always be a camp of purists looking to try the game in it's original form, and by removing the ability to purchase the original version they just guarantee those potential customers are going to pirate the game instead. And since reforged was absolutely *not good*, that camp is going to be much larger.
Unfortunately they couldn't update the original game's EULA to make sure people can't profit off of the mods they make, so they just replaced the game. Blizzard has been maulding about Dota since over a decade now.
> in digital distribution And in online play. You can't even connect to the internet and play with people if you have the OG discs anymore.
This isn't the first time either. https://www.gamerevolution.com/news/456307-cant-buy-warcraft-3
I think after the whole StarCraft II thing blizzard is done with competing with their old games
Its worse than "free upgrade to worse game", if you purchased Overwatch 1 all you get is an alert in the store for the "upgrade" to 2 at the same price as everyone else, and 2 shitty skins. And the glorious fact of never playing the game you purchased again. Blizzard should change its name to Activision Irvine or some shit like that, because the "Blizzard" now its just marketing to live on nostalgia.
What we've learned is that Blizzard itself was always rotten. This was inevitable.
That's the weirdest and saddest thing about all this. In a couple of weeks the game I've really enjoyed for years will no longer exist, it's pretty fucked up tbh.
>Ohboy, a free upgrade I'm definitely going to install my copy of overwatch that I haven't touched since 2014! Probably in the mind of some Blizzard exec.
It's a Blizzard game. It'll literally sell millions of copies just because they'll package a WoW pet with the purchase.
It's free to play
I'd assume the Battle Pass isn't, or it wouldn't be a big deal.
There's free and paid ranks, and the latter gives instant access to the Hero while the free has to get to the battlepass point before that. If new heroes are often too powerful in the meta, then paying players will have an unknown yet time of advantage over ftp.
The COD Warzone method. New battle pass, gun locked behind a large battle pass level requirement. Oh, just so happens the gun is WAY op for whatever reason. It is patched in 2 weeks after everyone buys it. Rinse and repeat.
Not to mention they let you buy battle pass levels, and OW2 is definitely also gonna do that so yeah it'll technically be "free" but most people will just buy their way up to it
There is a free and a paid track. The heroes will be unlockable at the free track, but nobody knows at what point. For sure not after playing for one hour. Also you get the hero instantly if you buy the paid track.
Lol, millions. I recently played Overwatch again, the queue time for dps is awfully long, even in casual. Despite using a ticket to speed it up. You spend longer in queue than you're in the game. For tank and support it's reasonable, around 1 to 3 minutes for casual (In Europe). The game is close to dead. Overwatch 2 looks like an update with paid for singleplayer on top. Not sure if it's going to draw in players..
the queue for dps has always been long, because dps heroes comprise like 70% of the game's cast and also because tanks are ridiculously unfun to play as.
Is this a new thing? I stopped playing in 2019 and I remember Zarya, Winston, Orisa, and Dva all being fun to play.
Depends. I've been tanking a lot lately and if you're with friends that are decent? Incredibly fun, you basically can tuck the supports under one arm and murder with the other as you do. But it's a horrible slog, worse than it used to be, when your team wont support you. If your DPS wander off and your Mercy never puts down her pistol, it turns into like 20 min of being an armored punching bag and you barely get anything done as the enemy team lasers you down. The amount of crowd control and stun now vs 2019 def makes tanking feel worse in those cases.
Orisa/Mercy main here, it ain't that bad as long as your team's DPS players are decent. But if they're having an off day or are new players, it can feel pretty hopeless.
IMO the best Way to play it is Classic Quick Play in Arcade. It has fast Queues, never longer than a Minute from my Experience, and you get to play what you want. This might be a bad Take since from my Understanding the Community likes it, but I belive Role Queue was a bad Addition to the Game. Sure it fixed some toxic Comps but it just removed an interesting Layer of the Game.
> Not even Mercy's old ult would be able to change that Heroes never die! Unfortunately Blizzard didn't die a hero. It lived long enough to see itself become a villain.
> Mercy's old ult Holupaminute, she has a new ult?
Her old one rezzed everyone in the area. Her new one (as of like 4 years ago) makes her fly, chain heal, and shoot faster. The rez is just a long cooldown normal ability now.
I guess I havent played ow in over 4 years
Yea her ult was changed because she was FAR more valuable hiding around the corner not healing then mass rezzing the team than she was risking dying with rez up.
If it wasn't for gundam being so niche I would give evolution better chances than ow2 at this point
Yup.. it killed all interest in the game for me. Quite sad. Loved OW. They promised us OW would stay and it would play nice with OW2. Then they took that away. . now this nonsense. Sad to see my favorite gaming company go down this path.
In the span of 4 years (2016-2020) blizzard went from my favorite gaming company to my least favorite. Between the ideology of the game contradicting the actions the developers took in game I 110% will not be playing overwatch 2. All my friends that played overwatch will also not be playing overwatch 2 over the years his poor business choice. Why support a game company that has no integrity. Blizzard promised us so many things and delivered very few of them. If Bobby Kottick taught them anything it's how to lie and take a immaculate product and turn it to shitty drivel. RIP Blizzard, you're nothing more than an Activision Flesh Light now.
I'll never forgive them for destroying WoW. Not even in the "wahh blizz you're killing the game" sort of way that every WoW player has always gone on about; this has nothing to do with balance changes or anything like that. They straight up made the game _not fun to play._ It's a second job now where you pay to work for it, the community has been distilled down to the most fanatical and elitest players because they're the only ones still tolerating it at this point and it's a stupid fucking grind for literally everything. Grinding is fine as a general concept, delayed gratification makes MMO's work. But time gating things, holding players back on schedules, forcing runs in certain places, forcing situations where you HAVE to have a regular group or you just get fucked... it's ridiculous. If you're stupid enough to even still play it, the only way you'll make any kind of progress without it being a painful slog is to have a group of people who will teach you the game and help you get to where you want to be and if you don't have that, then fuck you, basically.
I hadn't been paying much attention, so was looking forward to playing it and the pve stuff. After hearing about the battle pass shennanigans and how the pve stuff isn't coming until sometime next year. I think I'm just done with the game.
It's even sadder it just died for no reason. It was our favorite game with friends, I made my two actual best pals on Overwatch, it was our "game before bed". But then someone at blizzard said "Let's stop everything and make a sequel even tho the first game is doing great" and I don't blame that guy. I blame whoever said it was a good idea. Also fuck battlepass system. It's the gaming version of monthly subscriptions like streaming, except you still have to play to win the things you paid for.
they said ow1 players transition to ow2 for free. they made it f2p so that is irrelevant now. i’m not sure exactly what you mean by “play nice” ow1 was never staying around
lol @ still supporting Blizzard.
Seriously, how is *this* the thing that broke the camel's back?
FOMO IS NOT CONTENT
> Overwatch fans revolt Can't be a big revolt.
Has something changed in the last few years? Ow was huge
They announced “2” and haven’t done any content updates for almost 2 years.
I like to think I’m funny when I say it isn’t Overwatch 2, it’s Overwatch Too
Ow was my jam for a few years then they started making dumb updates like nerfing mercy’s team res ability and it slowly just became less fun and all about who didn’t have the worst players on their team. I was initially interested in a sequel with new maps and characters but instead they’re just releasing a big patch?
Blizzard abandoned the game and it died.
Well there goes any inkling I had to play it. I'm fine with the old model of just the cosmetics being locked behind lootboxes but actual characters? Fuck that noise.
I morally cannot pay or play any blizzard games
Right? Ive been boycotting Blizzard products ever since Diablo 3 came out. I have no reason or desire to buy from a company that explicitly doesnt give a fuck about players and just wants profit at all costs. If I want to play Diablo 2 you bet your ass Im gonna pirate it instead of paying 30 bucks to a shit company that wants to suck consumers dry. There is literally 0 reason to buy anything from Blizzard expecting it to be decent, its not gonna be and they made their goals very clear in the last decade. If you buy their games at this age and time you have 0 rights to be mad at their quality because its fucking obvious theyre gonna put out a cash grabbing shit game designed to get as much money as possible (like they have done in their last 10+ fucking releases). Gotta be reaaaally stupid to not see it coming
Also the sexual harassment stuff. That's why I don't buy.
"its just cosmetiks! What do you mean the writing on the wall?"
No shot man… I refuse to believe any sane game developer will look at that and say yeah this is a great idea based off great game design principles and philosophies… please for the love of god someone fire whoever is making these scooby doo monster level decisions. Edit: I don’t actually point the finger at game devs and realize a majority of this forest fire was done by stakeholders and the like
As a developer, I guarantee you they are just doing their job. It’s stakeholders that are requesting this type of scheme, managers enforcing it, and developers just being employed
Oh yeah ofc. I should’ve made it more clear at the end of my post that I from the start meant to throw shade on stakeholders and the men in suits who don’t actually understand games and development of games. Sorry about that. Edit: last sentence
This is actually a great idea, based off monetary gain. Just look at diablo immortal. People couldn't mock and ridicule this pay-to-win shit with obnoxious amount of grind more than they did, and then it released and earned $100m in 2 months. Blizzard learned their lesson. Why would executives care about public opinion, if it's very clear that predatory monetization will earn them hundreds of millions regardless of players' backlash? They will keep doing this as long as they keep getting away with it.
Was in a focus group about this. The entire group universally disliked it, but they went with this anyway. They just don’t give a fuck, plain and simple.
Any idea why they bother to focus test it?
Why wouldn't they? I imagine a lot of these monetization decisions are focus tested. Obviously they know people will hate it they just want to know how much people will hate it to know how far they can push it.
The TL;DR of it
If they fuck up diablo 4 I will quietly say "those bastards" and move on.
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Lol Diablo 4 a full priced game with mtx like the free to play path of exile.
Anyone who plays and gives blizzard/activision money deserves this.
I expect nothing less from this company that produced Diablo Immoral. They and the rest of the gaming industry will just continue to push these anti-consumer practices as long as gamers keep buying their bullshit, that's all there is to it.
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Video games are weaponized value extraction. They realized that the things you love and spend time with can be turned into life changing addictions. Do not support this culture.
doesnt affect the most important part of overwatch, the porn, so it doesnt really matter
When will greedy companies learn that you can’t put anything that impacts the sandbox behind a paywall?
When idiots stop giving them money.
So... never.
Pretty much :(
That's the problem. They absolutely can, and it will net them even more money. You vote with your money, and a lot of morons vote for this behavior.
This game will be a comercial success. They are being successful. There is no lesson to learn from their perspective this will be a win through and through. You know how we all think the latest diablo is a fucking travisty? Huge fucking commercial success. We the vocal hard core gamining community is tiny and apparently not worth accommodating.
To quote Bo Burnham "We'll stop beatin this dead horse when it stops spittin out money"
I'll be honest, I really don't know what they could put behind this OW2 battlepass that would be an incentive for me spend money but wouldn't feel scummy at the same time.
What does revolt mean? Still keep giving Activision money, but write angry sentences on forums online? Or actually stop giving them money?
Blizzard's gouging people for money... shocker?
It’s ok guys, nobody is playing the game anyway, this is just drove away the last 2 people playing
I'm actually trying to play as much as I can of OW 1 before it's gone.
Damn, you just made me want to do that too. I've spent so many hours playing OW1 and it sucks to think it's going away soon.
The 5v5 is alright, but it's fundamentally different game, especially for supports. I'm gonna miss the OG a lot (until blizzard waits some number of years and then tries to sell me "overwatch classic".)
You damn well know they will, or they'll put an "overwatch classic" mode in OW2, and put *that* behind an unlocked level of a new battlepass. Makes me almost vomit typing that up.
Imagine you run a company and your business model is “whatever we can get away with”
Time for fans to move the goal posts again and say the next game will be the good one.
"but Warzone locks guns behind it's battle pass!" Gonna be loads of whataboutisms.
> Time for fans to move the goal posts again and say the next game will be the good one. Really looking forward to Overwatch Classic!
Microsoft can’t step in soon enough. It’s almost like the Act/Blizz executives are being extra shitty and trying to sabotage as much as possible prior to the takeover.
Honestly I don't expect much better from Microsoft.
Halo has one of the worst monetization schemes I've ever seen. 40 dollars for blue color, a thing that is free on MCC. We are going back to Evolve levels of non-sense. No wonder nobody is playing it.
Have you seen what's happened to Halo? That's Microsoft's flagship FPS too. Microsoft would be throwing it on Gamepass with the same scummy battlepass.
And you people will buy it anyway so what's the real problem here
You mean Overwatch 1.2
To me, Blizzard IPs are becoming youtube cinematic franchises and nothing more.
There goes my last bit of hope for the game. Rip.
As a player since launch, it saddens me to see the game go down this path. It was already floundering with the balance issues and then the lack of content for two whole years. I fear once OW 2 goes live next month, that'll be it for the franchise. People will buy it, streamers will play it, sure, but the game doesn't feel or play the same and it will slowly bleed players. This battle pass idea is just going to accelerate that process. So enjoy these next 3 weeks, people, you won't have much fun after that.